A Man of Steel With Feet of Clay

TWICE in the last month visits to the Sony Pictures lot here went much the same way.

The normally efficient guards at the gate struggled with their computers. They were unable, on the first trip, to find a trace of the writer-producer Akiva Goldsman or, on the second, of the actor and director Peter Berg.

“Why aren’t these people in the system?” snapped an exasperated young man in the booth on the second visit.

Actually, both Mr. Goldsman and Mr. Berg are in the system. Sort of.

Lately the two men are fixtures at Sony, where they have spent the breezy spring weeks in meeting rooms and darkened stages, wrangling the last round of work on a film, “Hancock,” that will occupy thousands of America’s movie screens over the July 4 weekend.

In a larger sense, however, the two are exactly what they seemed during those hang-ups at the studio gate: consummate insiders with just enough of the outsider about them to keep the Hollywood system on edge.

Both make big movies for big companies. “Hancock,” with Will Smith — by some accounts the most valuable star in the world right now — will cost roughly $150 million to produce, and a similarly large amount to market worldwide.

Yet neither can resist the kind of movie that nudges a studio one step beyond its safety zone. “Mr. & Mrs. Smith,” of which Mr. Goldsman was a producer, was a tale of love-struck assassins trying to kill each other; “The Kingdom,” directed by Mr. Berg, was an unlikely action caper set in Saudi Arabia.

“Hancock” is probably two steps past safe. This time Mr. Smith, who shares a penchant for pushing the envelope (think of “Ali,” undertaken when he was still an action-comedy star), plays a superhero who swills bourbon, hates his job and looks unnervingly like Mr. Berg, who was considerably bedraggled in the final weeks of work on his film. (According to Mr. Goldsman, Mr. Smith, on meeting Mr. Berg in one of his work-worn states, said: “Oh. Oh. He is Hancock.”)

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Will Smith plays a superhero with problems in Hancock.Credit
Columbia Pictures

Along with, among others, Michael Mann, one of the producers of “Hancock,” and James Lassiter, Mr. Smith’s longtime producing partner, the two belong to what Mr. Goldsman likes to call a loose collective of like-minded filmmakers. By their own account they keep pushing an increasingly corporate entertainment industry to do what scares it a little — and not just stick to a summerful of sequels and animated sure shots.

“It is more difficult, and more necessary, at the same time,” Mr. Mann said recently, speaking of the ticklish art of making movies that keep the system from boring itself, and the audience along with it.

Eleven weeks before the release of “Hancock” Mr. Berg and company were still testing the creative boundaries. Their picture has a spot on the schedule filled last year by Paramount’s toy-driven crowd-pleaser, “Transformers.” As of mid-April, however, it had been twice to the ratings board and tagged each time with an R, not acceptable for a movie that must ultimately be rated PG-13 to reach its intended broad audience.

“We had statutory rape up until three weeks ago,” Mr. Berg said, describing just one of the elements that has turned “Hancock” into an exercise in brinkmanship.

Sipping coffee in a studio kitchenette, having finally been allowed through the gate, three-day growth and worn Macalester Scots T-shirt notwithstanding, he spoke with a candor usually reserved for the retrospective DVD commentary.

The film, he said, remained surprisingly sexual, violent and true in spirit to an original script that was viewed as brilliant but unmakable when its creator, Vincent Ngo, first circulated it more than a decade ago under the title “Tonight, He Comes.”

Keeping it that way became what Mr. Berg called “an epic game of chicken.” The filmmakers, for instance, long ago conceded that their hero should not get drunk with a 12-year-old. But their concession was a bargaining chip, aimed at keeping a similar situation with a 17-year-old in the final version, which was still weeks from being locked as Mr. Berg spoke in April. Another touchy area, Mr. Berg said, involved flying, never mind driving, under the influence.

Asked about the process, Amy Pascal, Sony’s co-chairwoman, took a chipper view. “Will Smith playing a superhero in a movie that’s funny and has tons of action, that’s not so hard,” she said in a telephone interview.

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Mr. Smith with Akiva Goldsman, one of the films producers.Credit
Katsumi Kashhara/Associated Press

Pressed a bit, however, Ms. Pascal acknowledged that “Hancock” does break some ground. “It’s scary in that it goes farther than we’ve gone before,” she said.

By Mr. Berg’s lights the executives became comfortable with the film only recently. That occurred when they settled on a marketing approach that played down drama in favor of action and humor. In one of the trailer’s highlights Mr. Smith heaves a beached whale out to sea and smashes a sailboat.

“The ad campaign for this movie is much friendlier than the film,” Mr. Berg noted.

That Sony would stake its summer on an unusually alienated superhero — even the Batman of “The Dark Knight” does not sleep on a bus bench — owes much to its enduring relationship with Mr. Smith. Beginning with “Bad Boys” in 1995, he has made seven films with the studio, all of them successes. “Will Smith in anything makes it even better,” Ms. Pascal said.

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That Mr. Smith in turn would stake his platinum persona on such an unlikable (by design) character owes a great deal to Mr. Goldsman, who has made a career out of movies that are just subversive enough to let the biggest star feel he is sneaking past the studio gate.

The best of those films can look like sure bets in retrospect, but at the time they often were not. “A Beautiful Mind” had taxed Universal with its story of a schizophrenic mathematician. Yet Russell Crowe rode the role to an Academy Award nomination in 2002, and the movie won the Oscar for best picture and a writing Oscar for Mr. Goldsman.

Warner Brothers proved similarly skittish over its smash horror hit “I Am Legend,” a movie that starred Mr. Smith, with Mr. Goldsman as both a writer and a producer.

“It’s a silent movie, Will doesn’t make a single joke, we kill a dog and then kill” the hero, Mr. Goldsman said, describing studio reservations about his version of the “Legend” script.

Almost as dapper as Mr. Berg is grizzled, Mr. Goldsman is at ease in a sport coat and delights in playing the cheerful provocateur. Over a Cobb salad in Sony’s commissary, he recalled offering Mr. Ngo’s far more difficult screenplay to Warner executives, who were then busy trying to revive their Superman franchise. As he remembered it, they said: “No. No. No, no, no.”

Later he persuaded a college friend, Richard Saperstein, to acquire an option on the script for an independent company, Artisan Entertainment, where Mr. Saperstein was an executive. Mr. Mann, another friend, agreed to direct it, but at a crucial moment chose to do “Miami Vice” for Universal instead, though he remained a producer.

“This is about why Superman can’t get a date,” Mr. Goldsman said, speaking of Warner’s reluctance to make a movie that dares to parody one of its most enduring characters. Hancock, he explained, cannot spend the night with a woman he meets at a party. “The physical impracticalities of this, this is what we play with,” he said.

The material is sufficiently risqué that Mr. Goldsman said he now believes the system — executives, agents, leery handlers — might have warned Mr. Smith away from it, had Mr. Goldsman not traded directly on a working friendship rooted in his earlier involvement with both “I Am Legend” and “I, Robot.” (Mr. Smith did not respond to requests, through his publicist, to be interviewed for this article.)

It also helped that Mr. Goldsman is no stranger to Sony, confusion at the guard stand aside. He has adapted both “The Da Vinci Code” and its sequel, “Angels & Demons,” for the studio and Imagine Entertainment.

Still, executives must be mindful of the risks into which Mr. Goldsman and his associates have drawn the company. It has its own superhero franchise to protect, in “Spider-Man,” and a star who has made Sony a fortune when he has been inspirational, as in “The Pursuit of Happyness” in 2006, or lovable, as in “Hitch” a year earlier.

But the best ones are always a bit intimidating. “So was Jack Nicholson in ‘As Good as It Gets,’ ” a Sony film for which he won an Oscar, Ms. Pascal said.

And, as Mr. Goldsman noted, the business still yearns, in its wary way, for life on the edge.

“Everybody knows that you want to break the box,” he said. “It’s just that the act of breaking the box is really frightening.”